Honest Choices: Complexity, Elitism And The Frustration Of Fundamental Reform
by
Gary Endelman

A system so complex that those most affected by it have little, if any, idea
of what is happening to them rarely presents the American people with the
opportunity to make honest choices about what kind of immigration system
they really want. Regardless of whether they are for open borders or
closing the gates, immigration activists are united in the belief that the
maintenance of such complexity is in their institutional self-interest.
Knowledge is power and power is not to be shared with the American people.
Indeed, the whole point of any effective immigration strategy is not to
disclose ultimate ends but focus on incremental change that is
self-contained without any discussion of its wider impact. Tactics are
everything and success is defined solely in terms of short-time outcomes.
Such a chess game leaves federal agencies despairing of meaningful
congressional oversight, thus forcing, perhaps allowing, them to change the
immigration law on their own through enforcement and interpretation. How
much and what kind of immigration America needs or wants are questions
rarely high on the agenda. The less the public knows, the more the experts
can dominate the conversation.

It may be that the American people would turn thumbs down on an enlightened
and expansive immigration policy if they were ever allowed to decide. They
have not been. Ironically, while the pro-immigration lobby, and its
organized representatives, constantly proclaims that America benefits from
more immigration, they seem not to believe their own slogans. One suspects
that, in their inner sanctums and secret gardens, the pro-immigration
groups share nagging doubts about the wisdom of the body politic and secretly
suspect that their fellow citizens may not really embrace the immigrant
cause after all. Beyond that, maybe it is not just Main Street that doubts
this, maybe those calling most loudly for more employment-based immigration
do not really believe that this is good for America. At their core, they
have always secretly felt that business-related immigration lacks sufficient
moral integrity to justify their support.

Indeed, most organized immigration groups like to approach immigration as
an expression of social outreach or international social work. Asylees,
refugees, family unity- all this is OK because it helps the poor and the
downtrodden themselves. By contrast, growing the economy in a way that
benefits corporate America makes these same immigration advocates
uncomfortable. Help Wall Street and Silicon Valley? Be on the same side as
the multi-nationals? Enlist under the banner of a free market economy in
the age of corporate fraud? Hardly the heady stuff for a great moral crusade.
Perhaps the reason that many immigration advocates do not invest
fundamental reform of employment-based immigration with the same passion and compassion
that they so readily and repeatedly lavish upon immigration issues without
such large $ signs is that, when the dust settles, they neither trust nor
believe in the capitalist system or the values it represents. While these
groups spend much time and effort to influence Congress and the INS on
employment-related issues, their activism flows not from an honest
conviction in the creative potential of work, but from a practical
realization that their economic self-interest, and that of their clients,
is directly at stake. They care because they have to.

The nativists are equally disingenuous. They know that, if the American
people are not scared into extreme actions, our national traditions of
openness, generosity, and cultural diversity will win out. The organized
anti-immigrant lobby does not want a robust national conversation on
immigration; rather, they want a crisis whose fever pitch will make such a
dialogue impossible. To these folks, the tragedy of September 11th is a
godsend; the Tom Tancredos of the world, who had previously been
marginalized into political insignificance, are now making a comeback on
Capitol Hill. They need a frightened America to hang on to political
respectability. The more threatened the nation seems to be, the better the
nativists like it. They may cry for more green cards and less H-1Bs but, if
truth be told, most of this crowd wants neither. It rejects the notion that
a regulated movement of peoples must accompany a regulated movement of
capital, goods and services as an inescapable feature of American
involvement in the global economy of the 21st century.

Truth be told, both the pro- and anti- immigration people do not trust the
American people to do the right thing. How they define that is, of course,
diametrically opposite. What unites them is a desire to keep the game
within the Beltway in order to maximize their own importance. For that to happen,
complexity must remain an implacable obstacle to true reform.
Right now, bad laws survive because they are not enforced and do not last
when they are. Look what happened with IRCA. Big business and organized
labor, for example, both want an end to the failed concept of employer
sanctions but September 11th has stalled the momentum for repeal; the INS
can read the political tea leaves and has decided sub silentio to attack
criminal aliens and leave the employment of the undocumented, save for the
most open and obvious examples, essentially undisturbed. If they did not,
if the INS tried to make employer sanctions mean something, the American
economy would recoil in protest.The last time the INS got serious about I-9
compliance, meat packers in the Midwest and onion growers in
Georgia went nuts. The best way to get rid of this failed I-9 experiment is for
the INS to start enforcing IRCA.

The same thing is happening with the current INS obsession with keeping
tabs on alien domiciles. The Department of Justice appears to be serious
about enforcing a requirement that all aliens, even green card holders,
inform the INS of every change in address within 10 days. Since America is
the world's most mobile society, not to mention that immigrants move around
even more than their neighbors, it is easy to foresee a veritable Niagara of
AR-11 change of address forms descending on the Service in the weeks and
months to come. Last Sunday, the Associated Press reported that more than 2
million documents, including some 200,000 AR-11s, were gathering dust at
the INS warehouse complex outside of Kansas City, Missouri. INS spokesperson Bill
Strassberger explained that "The field offices weren't sure what to do with
all of the documents they had not been able to look through, and they were
a bit overwhelmed by the unprecedented growth in immigration." Immigration
rights advocates have it all wrong. Instead of screaming against the INS
campaign to force change of address notification, they should go into every
place where the foreign-born live and coordinate a tidal wave of AR-11
activity that will drown the Service in its own bureaucracy.

America needs to look itself square in the mirror and decide what our
policy on immigration should be. Those who have dominated the conversation until
now should step aside. The doubters, and the detractors, the silent men
whispering in the shadows are wrong. We can approach big issues in a mature
way and come up with the right answers. It is long past time that
fundamental decisions on immigration should be taken away from the experts.
We need fewer immigration laws and rules that are easier to both understand
and enforce, not more statutes with no end in sight whose very complexity
frustrates enforcement and encourages disrespect for the law itself. We
need much more immigration and much stricter enforcement. It should not be that
hard to decide how immigration can help the economy and go from there.

It is necessary for the American people and their elected representatives to
regain control of what our immigration laws mean from an unelected
bureaucracy that creates policy based on institutional memory and its own
sense of what counts. Elections may come and go, Congress switches hands,
new occupants move into the White House, yet the INS and the USDOL remain,
largely immune from either congressional oversight or popular will. Lamar
Smith or Barney Frank may come and go but the DOL goes on forever! When we
talk of H-1B compliance, for example, does it really make a dime's worth of
difference if George Bush or Mao Tse-Tung is in charge? This is a little
understood but pernicious tax that all of us pay to the unholy alliance of
complexity and elitism.

We, as a nation, have lost the ability to shape those immigration policies
that most shape us. America does not, for example, know how many or what
kind of foreign workers it wants and so the US Department of Labor responds
by piling one set of regulations on top of the last until the life of every
tree on the planet is in danger. America does not know how or whether such
workers contribute to, or undermine, the national interest and so the INS
decides to curb its insatiable appetite for uneven adjudication by
enunciating a set of criteria under the New York State Department of
Transportation decision that, while not repealing the national interest
waiver provision outright, placed it on life support from which it is only
now being weaned. It is not surprising that, as a people, we do not provide
our civil servants with the guidance they need, and which they have every
right to receive, since our political class, and the lobbyists on whom they
depend for expertise, have conspicuously and deliberately failed to give it
to them. Not knowing what the nation wants, the bureaucracy decides for
itself and everyone loses.

I believe that the American people will support more immigration if we, who
claim to want it, have the ability and the guts to tell them why we are
right and really mean it. Where do we start? The same place where former
President Ronald Reagan started:

"Humans are humans. We all wish for a better life for our families and
children. The blood that has soaked into the earth of
foreign lands while defending our freedom is all of one color. We are
unique...we are a country founded on immigration.
We are a country of immigrants. That is what makes us strong. That is what
allows us to move forward. This is the American way."

About The Author

Gary Endelman practices immigration law at BP America Inc. The opinions expressed in this column are purely personal and do not represent the views or beliefs of BP America Inc. in any way.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of ILW.COM.